Central Denmark Region

Central Denmark Region is using Identity Manager to improve security and auditability and reduce the cost of identity and security management for its 33,000 employees.

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About Central Denmark Region

Central Denmark Region (Region Midtjylland in Danish) is one of the five administrative regions of Denmark. The primary responsibility of the administration is the provision of healthcare to the region's 1.2 million inhabitants, who make up 22 percent of the Danish population. In addition, the administration's 33,000 employees operate a number of social institutions and coordinate regional development activities.

Challenge

Central Denmark Region was created in 2007 as part of the Danish Municipal Reform, which simplified the administrative map by consolidating 13 traditional counties into five larger groupings. As a result of this merger, the new administration faced the challenge of integrating a disparate set of IT resources and organisational units.

In particular, Central Denmark Region needed to build a consistent, centralised identity management architecture to enable employees to securely access shared services and data. Previously, local hospitals and institutions had managed their own users, and the existing solutions and working practices were not sophisticated enough to support the new organisation.

Moreover, the existing approaches required significant amounts of manual administration, resulting in lengthy delays in provisioning and deprovisioning users and access rights. Not only did the lack of automation mean high costs, it also made it difficult to implement and audit security policies.

Solution

The Central Denmark Region IT function selected Identity Manager as a result of the success of an earlier project involving us.

"We selected Micro Focus eDirectory as the only solution sophisticated enough to cope with the size and complexity of our organisational structure," said Henrik Jordt, Enterprise Architect, Central Denmark Region. "That initial project was highly successful, and provided the ideal basis for expanding into a full identity management solution."

Central Denmark Region worked with Steria, a Business Partner, to design and implement the identity and security management solution, including custom-built role-based provisioning workflows. "Steria has strong competence in the identity management space, and an open, highly professional approach," said Jordt.

"Working with Central Denmark Region was an opportunity to combine our business and technical skills to help solve a major organisational challenge, delivering significant benefits," said Michael Toft Sørensen, Head of Department, Steria A/S.

Using Identity Manager, Central Denmark Region created a master directory of employees and built workflows to automate provisioning. When the HR department enters a new employee into the payroll system, the solution creates their login credentials. The employee's manager can then visit a portal to assign access to specific applications. Once fully operational, the portal will also enable the rapid set-up of temporary users, such as students and visiting scientists.

"The automated user provisioning enabled by Identity Manager saves us considerable time and effort, and also reduces delays for users," said Jordt. "The solution also automatically generates a notification letter for users, containing their single username and password. Previously, this was a time-consuming manual process."

On average, Central Denmark Region users require access to 10 applications. Identity Manager synchronises the username and password across all relevant applications, so users no longer need to remember multiple credentials. Identity Manager also enforces password strength, and prompts users to change their password using a self-service portal every 90 days.

Results

Using Identity Manager saves significant amounts of time and effort for the Central Denmark Region administration. Using Identity Manager, Central Denmark Region estimates that it can reduce user management time by 70 percent, freeing up thousands of man-hours per year while simultaneously increasing the quality of service.

"The automation and self-service features of Identity Manager are helping us to maintain a streamlined IT organisation—we have just 250 staff serving 33,000 employees," said Steffen Ørnemark, CIO. "As well as keeping costs low, the Novell (now a part of Micro Focus) solution delivers much higher quality. We can now give instant access to systems instead of keeping users waiting for several days."

The solution has also improved security, ensuring that former employees automatically lose their access rights and providing detailed logs for audit purposes. It also gives managers a clear view of their employees' access rights and activities, helping to build closer connections between business and IT.

"A side benefit of the identity management project is that it has enabled a stronger dialogue with the business," said Inge Broberg Kristiansen, Area Manager for Digital Administration, Central Denmark Region. "We have a unique perspective across the organisation, enabling us to identify bottlenecks and propose improvements to the workflow in the business. The flexibility of Identity Manager helps us to be more proactive and to tighten process support between IT and the business."